Hamlet Revenge!

by Michael Innes

  ‘Perhaps because there looks to be an uncommon lot to jump about between. But the likelihoods about Happy are part of my main drive at the moment – eliminating the spy-notion finally. Point is that this safe was cracked by a professional person in the way of ordinary business, and with no thought of secret documents.’

  ‘Yes, I think the spy-scare is out of court.’ Gott paused in sudden perplexity. ‘But there was some other reference to spies, if I could remember; besides Elizabeth’s in the garden, I mean.’ His brow cleared. ‘Oh, it was just an earlier joke of hers, or perhaps of Noel’s. That Bunney was the spy in black; his black box must have suggested the phrase. A lot of blacks we were bandying; spy in black, black box, black hand, black man–’

  ‘Meaning the Indian who found the document?’

  ‘Mr Bose. It was Bose who found the document? Curious; he was first with the body too.’ Gott’s eyes suddenly narrowed. ‘John – when? When did be find it?’

  ‘Midnight,’ said Appleby quietly. ‘Remember, they have all been searched.’

  ‘An hour after the killing! Well, there’s something I should have been at the lodge gates to tell you, and it’s come to me only now. Searched! Did you get Nave or Biddle to do a little trepanning – to look inside their skulls?’

  ‘Out with it, Giles.’

  ‘The black man’s memory. It’s like a photographic plate. If he could contrive to read through a longish document once – even in covert snatches – I believe it would be in his head next to verbatim.’

  ‘And so – just conceivably – re-enter the spies.’ If Appleby’s tone was sceptical his action was decided. He strode to the telephone by the bed-head. And just as his hand went out to it it rang. He picked up the receiver.

  ‘Les Présages,’ said Appleby presently, causing Gott to stare. And after a longer interval he said steadily and formally: ‘I am aware of a probable channel and have a good chance of getting the situation under control.’ A moment later he had rung off and swung round. ‘Giles, is the house isolatable?’

  ‘Yes. Designed by a rectangular mind. Foursquare with two wings and broad terraces on all four sides, even towards the offices. And you can floodlight them.’

  Appleby snatched up the telephone again. ‘The green-room, please… Sergeant?… Is the search over…all gone? How many men have you?… Good…turn them all out on the terraces this instant, light up and patrol. And if anyone tries to make a getaway they can hit hard… Yes, of course.’ Rapidly he added some further instructions. ‘Hurry.’ Again he rang off.

  ‘Les Présages?’ queried Gott, taking up the first point of bafflement.

  ‘Sort of password – as used in sensational fiction when there are spies about. And they are about; right back in the centre of the picture. That was one Hilfers, a spy-fancier. Somebody in your respectable audience celebrated his release by sending a wire from a local call-box: the thing had been worked and the goods would shortly be despatched. A dark message but intercepted, Hilfers says, on its way to a recipient that puts the thing beyond doubt. There has been miching mallecho with that document, all right. But if your playbox was as tight shut as is made out we have half a grip on the thing yet. And now we’ll find the little black chap.’

  He strode to the door and opened it – and then Gott heard an oath he had never heard from Appleby before. In a moment he discovered the reason. The little black chap had not been far to seek. His corpse lay across the threshold.

  4

  Looking back upon this stage of the Scamnum affair Appleby was to ponder, in unprofessional perplexity, on the vagaries of human emotion. Lord Auldearn had died full of years, dignity, and achievement; almost the last of a line of scholar-statesmen whom he profoundly respected. The books which represented the dead man’s incursions into literature and theology were on his shelves in the little Westminster flat; and in the midst of a world dipping towards chaos Auldearn’s name had stood out, for him as for many others, as a point of resistance and of sanity. If the Duke of Horton were a show-case Elder Statesman Auldearn had been the real thing.

  Auldearn had been murdered; and within an hour Appleby had heard talk of confusion and craziness drawing nearer as a result. It seemed as if the Scamnum Hamlet had yielded a full measure of irony; that on the make-believe Elizabethan stage Auldearn had died amid tragedy actual and profound – died guarding a wretched paper which, philosopher as he was, he must have believed to represent no more than the organizing of madness against madness. And these things – brutal murder, murder followed by the distant murmur (baseless, perhaps, as many such murmurs are, and yet, perhaps not baseless) of unimaginable calamity – these things had left Appleby almost unmoved. As a policeman he had been excited and as a policeman he had worked like a machine; he had debated with the unexpectedly discovered Gott with the elaborate detachment which had established itself long ago as a convention between them. But now an unknown black man, a waif from the Orient, a murderer it might be and a fomenter of mischief, had been tumbled lifeless before that other dead man’s door. And Appleby, who had seen a score of violent deaths, was shaken profoundly. He stood up, pale to the lips, and said not quite steadily: ‘Another dead man.’

  It was steadily enough that Gott responded, but he responded with a single word: ‘Nightmare’. And Appleby knew that Gott at least, collected as he was, had been facing nightmare for hours. Amid this general horror he had his own distress. These things had happened in the house in which – perhaps on the night on which – he had thought to speak to the Lady Elizabeth Crispin of marriage.

  An instant more and Appleby was speaking with decision. ‘The sergeant is on the rear stage; he must stop there until the ambulance comes. And the others are inside. I want you to come with me. Go and get somebody reliable to stay here, Giles. And get one of the doctors.’

  Gott stepped carefully over the body – stretched like some slumbering guard before an eastern monarch’s chamber – and departed silently down the dimly lit corridor. Once more Appleby knelt down. There was no question but that Mr Bose was dead: the thin lips were drawn back over the perfect teeth in a grimace of sudden overwhelming agony; the lustre of the dark complexion had turned to livid in irregular smears, as if here were a player who had hastily begun to swab off his makeup. Death had come from a dagger-thrust hard below the left shoulder-blade. And the weapon stood – horribly – in the wound still. Appleby scrutinized it coolly enough, rapidly searched the body. Then he stood up and half-murmured in perplexity: ‘I could have been almost sure…’ And then he shook his head. ‘Far, far too remote!’

  A minute later Gott came back, bringing Noel and Nave. Although fashionable Harley Street psychiatrists are not commonly called to examine two violent deaths in a night, Nave’s perturbation seemed no more than a convention of distress conceded to lay bystanders. He knelt for a long time, perhaps a full minute. Then he got up. ‘He is dead,’ he said, ‘and he was instantly killed. A blow from behind.’

  ‘A skilled blow?’

  Nave’s eyes went again to the dagger. ‘It might be an anatomist’s blow,’ he said gravely, ‘or it might be an evil chance.’ There was silence for a moment and he added: ‘Shall I stay here…or take any message?’

  Appleby shook his head. ‘There is nothing to be gained by your staying. Mr Gylby is going to stay for a time.’

  Nave glanced dubiously – perhaps with a sort of masked kindliness – at Noel, who looked strained and more than usually young. Then he nodded and went away. Noel looked resolutely at the body. He felt sorry for Mr Bose and wanted to say something restrainedly distressed. But a trial of his voice told him it would be risky and he found safety in being practical. ‘Mr Appleby, must it stay here? Could we move it into the bedroom? These other rooms are occupied…any of the women might come along.’

  Appleby nodded. ‘We can move the body. He wasn’t killed here.’ With Gott he stooped to the burden –
it was strangely light – and bore it into what had been Lord Auldearn’s room. Then for a moment they hesitated.

  ‘On the bed,’ said Noel with the sudden authority of Scamnum. He threw off the upper coverings and they laid the body face downwards. Noel picked up the fine linen of the counterpane. ‘It won’t…damage anything on the knife?’ Appleby made a negative sign and they shrouded the body. For a moment they looked at the grim little pyramid which concealed the haft. Then Noel offered something practical again. ‘That dagger – I don’t know if you know – it hangs with some stuff on the wall outside the…the black man’s room. Medieval French, I think.’

  ‘Is his room next door?’ asked Appleby.

  ‘Lord, no. Some way off, round a couple of corners.’

  ‘And these rooms are nearly all occupied?’

  ‘Yes. Most people have gone straight to bed – or at least to their rooms – after the search. A curiously shaming process it was. But a few have been fluttering about to jabber.’

  Appleby shook his head in plain bewilderment – a habit, it occurred to Noel, never indulged in by Gott’s fictional sleuths. And then, almost as if he had read Noel’s glance, he smiled. ‘Decidedly the time-honoured stage at which nothing fits!’ But his voice instantly went hard. ‘And we can’t give our time to sitting back and thinking, Giles; some crazy logic of events is working itself out around us now. Come.’ He strode back to the door and turned to Noel. ‘Mr Gylby, do you mind – for an hour, perhaps?’

  ‘I shan’t doze off,’ said Noel drily. ‘Don’t bang the door.’

  In the corridor Appleby paused. ‘He wasn’t killed where he lay; there would have been a nasty sound we should have heard.’ He walked half a dozen yards down the corridor and called softly. ‘He was killed – where we’ll presently discover. There is blood as far as this that we can probably track. But here it stops, and here I take it the body was simply picked up, rushed the last six yards, and set gently down on our doorstep – and Auldearn’s. Now follow the trail, probably to his room.’

  ‘Intimidating scale the place is on,’ said Gott absently. The corridor along which they were walking was some eighteen feet wide; dark parquetry with six feet of patternless cream carpet down the centre.

  ‘Somebody wasn’t intimidated – nor concerned to avoid a mess.’ Appleby’s eyes were on the carpet; on the two clearly discernible furrows made in the deep pile by the dead man’s heels and on the steady sequence of congealing gouts of blood. ‘You see, Giles, how the evidence points different ways. The show of violence…’

  Gott started, made a gesture at Scamnum flitting past in the subdued light: vistas of dark panelling and soft enamels; the basic design elegant everywhere and a little dry, but relieved by the glow of rich stuffs, the gleam of fine cabinet-work; the whole eloquent of tranquillity and a large security – the Peace of the Augustans.

  ‘We do it wrong, being so majestical,

  To offer it the show of violence…

  The play is impressing itself on you too, John. Here is Bose’s room.’

  Mr Bose’s room was dominated, startlingly and appropriately, by a Gauguin: dusky figures crouched in a vibrant shade, a hot, dark composition that seemed to cast its tropical glow far into the cool greys and greens of the lofty room. And the apple-green carpet was flecked with blood; it was as if the mangoes that made fiery points in the picture had tumbled out and been crushed to an ooze about the floor. Gott sat down abruptly, almost as if he had been hit in the stomach. ‘It’s Elizabeth’s room,’ he said, ‘she moved out when this mob came – there’s a limit even to Scamnum’s resources.’ And then he said – and with bitterness – something that Appleby had said to himself in the Prime Minister’s car: ‘Death at Scamnum Court!’

  Appleby, who had already begun a swift exploration, paused. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It would be a learned joke. Perhaps somebody’s having a learned joke… Scamnum.’

  ‘Scamnum?’ Appleby frowned in perplexity. ‘A bench?’

  ‘Yes; it was arrogantly named after old Roger Crippen’s usurious counter. But it’s the same word as something else.’

  Appleby shook his head.

  ‘Shambles, John. For God’s sake let’s get something done!’

  Appleby was on the point of saying: ‘Steady!’ Instead he said quietly: ‘Come and look at the bureau.’

  The bureau stood to one side of the outer wall beneath a curtained window – a slender Chippendale piece. Near at hand, and overturned on the floor, was a low-backed mahogany chair. Appleby looked back at the door by which they had entered and then at another door in the side wall close at hand. Gott followed his glance. ‘A bathroom, I think, converted from a dressing-room and with a second door giving direct on the corridor.’ He moved swiftly across, disappeared, and returned in a moment. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then that is how he entered. Coming through the bathroom door he had only to take two strides – and stab. And he stabbed while the black man was–’

  ‘Writing!’ said Gott softly. They both stared at the narrow writing space of the bureau. A fountain-pen lay in the corner, amid a splash of ink suggesting that it had tumbled there from a surprised hand. The Scamnum notepaper was undisturbed in its place; Mr Bose had been writing on a common scribbling-block. And from this block some pages had been hastily ripped away. The exposed surface was blank; nevertheless Appleby picked up the block delicately and studied it with infinite care. ‘If things are as they seem,’ he said; ‘we’re both beaten. As a policeman I’m out-witted and as a fantasy-weaver you’re blown clean out of the water. Just cast about the floor, Giles, for the stub of the unique cigarette or the accidentally dropped scarab.’ But as he spoke Appleby himself was casting about the floor in a search that was wholly serious. And Gott, instead, cast about in the air.

  ‘Little Bose – Emissary A – kills Auldearn, snatches the damned paper, contrives to commit it to memory and then “discovers” it. As soon as the search is over he comes up to his room and gets it down on paper. Then an unknown B – a rival Emissary – stabs Bose…’ He buried his head in his hands. ‘John, it’s not impossible; it’s not even unlikely merely because it’s grotesque. The document is grotesque in itself – and yet there it is, with hard-headed people in London worrying their heads off over it. I suppose that there are scoundrels and scoundrels at the game; and that Bose, being one, should be stabbed and robbed by another seems likely enough.’

  ‘And yet’, said Appleby, ‘you get a feeling from the air that Auldearn’s death is basically a piece of theatrical effect, and mysteriously bound up with Hamlet. And what did you think of Bose, anyway? He’s in the middle of the picture now. Describe him.’

  Gott – avoiding the area between bureau and doors – strode up and down the room. ‘Like most of the Duchess’ finds he was charming. But there’s nothing easier, I suppose, than to find a charming and unearthly black man, and perhaps the process is just one of being taken in. If it had fallen on me to pronounce an emergency Last Judgement on Bose I should have sent him straight among the Saints, though he would have found their beliefs and proceedings absurd. But one can only have confidence in sizing up one’s own sort. The little man was far too remote…’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Appleby. He drew back the window-curtain, threw open the window on the summer night and leaned far out. Below was a brightly lit terrace with two constables constituting a very adequate patrol. He turned back into the room, locked the bathroom door, picked up the writing-block once more and moved towards the door by which they had come. And then he paused to repeat the burden of his thoughts. ‘If the substance of the document has really passed from Bose to unknown hands I’m next to beaten – and not all the constables in the home counties can help me.’ He opened the door and transferred the key to the outside. ‘Come along, Giles. There’s some hope. There was the way we dealt with Bose’s body – and there is the Duches
s. I promised not to disturb people again tonight but you must take me to her all the same – now.’

  Nevertheless Appleby stood a moment longer, his eye steadily on the further wall. And Gott realized with a start that in this, the crisis of his career, his friend – unobtrusively enough – was pausing to give proper attention to a noble picture. And for some reason his spirits rose.

  Carefully, Appleby locked the door of what had been the Lady Elizabeth Crispin’s room. Now it was to hold a ghost, a dusky presence that would hover before the uncertain shelter of that equatorial leafage, the half-recognition of those glancing eyes, the dubious kinship of those brown and glistening limbs.

  5

  Moving about Scamnum at night, it seemed to Appleby, was like moving in a dream through some monstrously overgrown issue of Country Life. Great cubes of space, disconcertingly indeterminate in function – were they rooms or passages? – flowed past in the half-darkness with the intermittent coherence of distant music, now composed into order and proportion, now a vague and raw material for the architectonics of the imagination. Here and there a light glowed still over a picture – on this floor pastel copies of family portraits scattered elsewhere: gentlemen extravagantly robust for the fragile medium into which they had been translated, ladies arbitrarily endowed with the too-heavy features of Anne and with dresses cut low over low, vaguely defined breasts. And the scale of things wavered as in some hypnogogic trance. A low chair in the distance started into a randomly disposed grand piano at one’s elbow. A hand extended to a door-knob fell upon air; the door was a door of unnatural size ten paces away. Appleby tried to imagine himself feeling at home amid this vastness and signally failed; he felt an inexpungeable bourgeois impression of being in a picture-gallery or museum – a well-contrived museum in which each ‘piece’ had air and space in which to assert its own integrity and uniqueness. He recalled the great palaces – now for the most part tenantless – which the eighteenth century had seen rise, all weirdly of a piece, about Europe. Scamnum, he knew, was to be a different pattern; would reveal itself in the morning as being – however augustly – the home of an English gentleman and a familiar being. But now it was less a human dwelling than a dream-symbol of centuries of rule, a fantasy created from the tribute of ten thousand cottages long perished from the land.